@Crashsequence2012 Deportations are way up under this administration and both spending and effectiveness of border security has been greatly increased. But for those that make perfection the goal, no amount of improvement will ever do. All the problems of this mighty nation will be scapegoated on those who are least among us—those who are completely powerless.

And to those who take your stance, no problem we face can be considered till we seal our border tighter than East Germany sealed theirs. Consider. They built two fences with concertina wire on top, a no-man’s land between, attack dogs and machine gun nests with search lights and still they could not secure their borders. How far would you have us go?

@ETpro in all seriousness I’m sure I wouldn’t, but I will still withhold judgement on whether it is a natural cyclical phase or a manmade phenomenon. I am sure we are contributing to it but again the smart people are still human & as they say to err is human….

@tacresHere’s traditionally conservative Forbes magazine reporting what the climate scientists actually competent to make such a judgment are saying. And there is this from the generally reliable BBC.

We know CO2 is a greenhouse gas. We know we add 29 billion tonnes of CO2 per year to Earth’s atmosphere. That’s more than 100 times what volcanic activity traditionally added, and of course, volcanoes haven’t gone dormant. We know that the atmospheric half life of CO2 is 37 years. It doesn’t take a rocket scientists to figure out that in those conditions, it will keep building up in the atmosphere till we quit adding it to the atmosphere. If it is human to err, isn’t it just remotely possible it is those who are denying the changes they are seeing before their eyes that are in error?

How many years before we burn up all the economically feasible carbon-based fuels on the planet? A century? Two?

At some point there won’t be nearly so much to put into the atmosphere, and the greenhouse effect will diminish. We will have to switch to energy sources that do not put carbon in the atmosphere, and presumably the planet will cool a bit.

So I don’t see global warming lasting forever. However, while it lasts, it is hard to say with much geographic accuracy what will happen where. We can say the oceans will rise, and the seashore lines will diminish. There will be hotter weather and larger and more dangerous storms.

That was something that bothered me at the Dem Convention. They made fun of the CEO of Exxon for saying something like “We will cope.” The truth is that we will cope. People will be hurt, and it’s already too late to stop that. But we will cope. And I think it’s too late to stop humankind from burning up all the oil and gas and coal we can find. It will happen. Tough noogies.

Would I like to see it happen over a more spread out time? Not sure. Intuitively, yes. But maybe it would be better to burn it all up fast and then be forced to move on. Because I don’t believe for a second that we can get it together, as a race, to stop ourselves from using the easy sources of energy as fast as possible.

I think it’s better to focus on coping mechanisms instead of worrying about if and when things will happen. Clearly, global warming has had an impact already, but it doesn’t matter if you agree with me or not. You still have to deal with the Katrinas and Isaacs and eroding shorelines and the need for energy. I believe we have to focus on energy production and on disaster preparedness, but I don’t think we can do anything about global warming.

@wundayatta Long before we exhaust the fossil fuel resources of the planet, we will increase greenhouse gasses and thus temperatures to the point that the methane currently frozen in the tundras and the methane clathrates frozen at the bottom of cold oceans and lakes will melt and bubble into the atmosphere. Methane is a greenhouse gas 30 times as powerful as CO2. And there are as much as 2 trillion 500 billion metric tonnes of Methane in such deposits. That release would raise the sea levels by approximately 350 feet and rapidly increase temperatures to the point that much of the biodiversity on earth today would meet sudden extinction. It has happened before due to natural causes. We’d be utter fools to trigger it through human greed.

@wundayatta there aren’t any glib, easy answers. How do you trap the methane bubbling up from all the tundras, deep lakes and oceans on earth? What would the carbon footprint of doing that, then burning all that methane be? The simplest fix, the one we have the basic technology to implement today, is to transition to renewable energy as rapidly as is practicable.

No wonder more sea ice cracks off every year…....
Cause there more of it!.....

Me thinks that our transit through the galactic plane, that is moving from the one side of the galactic plane with one polarity to the other side with the opposite polarity will probably make the earths magnetic field flip-to-suit, as will the suns, and every other planets in our solar system.

It would be interesting to know whether the Iceages corrolate with the transitions through the galactic plane?

@Pazza I’m against ad hominem rebuttals, but a blog post on a Con Man zine’s replies section is evidence, and NASA, the IPCC and climetologist around the world should just abandon their stance because it’s based on empirical evidence, and not oil company funded disinformation? Really?

Don’t be too worries about the transit of the galactic plane. It is well documented what happens. It’s a cyclical occurrence that happens on a 26,000 year timetable and bears no relationship to anthropomorphic CO2 buildup, which has never happened before.